A New Health Benefit Of Bacteria

Surprisingly, beneficial bacteria are looked to as a new class of treatments new super treatments for a wide body of ailments. Bacteria are being used to help treat conditions like IBS, Crohn’s, blood sugar issues and much more.

And now. there’s reason to believe beneficial bacteria may be able to help treat cancer.In an attempt to eliminate cancers that don’t respond to normal treatments, researchers investigated what would happen to tumors injected with bacteria.

Now, it was no ordinary bacteria the researchers used, but instead was a modified strain that would conceivably destroy cancer cells but would not harm surrounding healthy cells.

To see if this would work, researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center carried out an experiment with the intention of observing the cancer-cell damage the bacteria would produce while checking to make sure the bacteria did not produce an abundance of toxicity in the body.

The study to see how effective this treatment is was actually quite small.

As Medical News today wrote:The trial was an open-label one, meaning that all the participants knew what treatment they were receiving. In total, the researchers worked with 24 participants recruited in 2013–2017.

All of the participants had solid cancer tumors that were resistant to therapy. Specifically, 15 individuals had sarcoma, 17 had diverse carcinoma, and two had melanoma.

The researchers administered injections of C. novyi-NT spores directly into cancerous tumors. The injections were single doses containing between 10,000 and 3 million spores of the bacterium.

Two of the people who received the maximum doses of 3 million spores developed severe sepsis and gas gangrene, so the researchers determined that the maximum tolerated dosage is 1 million C. novyi-NT spores

Of 22 people who met the criteria for evaluation, 21 scored as “stable” on the RECIST assessment, meaning that the disease was neither increasing not decreasing in severity.

In these people, tumors shrank by more than 10 percent after their experimental injection. When taking into account both tumors that had been injected with C. novyi-NT and those that had not been injected with the bacterium, the stable disease rate, according to RECIST, was 86 percent.The reason this bacteria works so well at killing cancer cells is that it can survive in oxygen-depleted environments, which is an environment that some kinds of cancers thrive in.

This is also why this bacteria can wreak havoc on cancer cells and not harm surrounding cells – as it only survives in oxygen-depleted environments too.

This is why the researchers published their findings in the International Cancer Immunotherapy Conference and said that they saw clinically meaningful activity and has clear therapeutic options for the future.